A Short Report from the Cave Dwellers Village of Tuba

Dear friends,

Wednesday Nov. 14, 2012

In the midst of sirens and bombs in our area as part of the recent war between Israel and Gaza, I received a telephone call from Hamed from Hebron asking if we are safe. Five minutes later we received a telephone call from Eid inviting us to come to Um el Khair in South Mount Hebron because it is safer there. “It is Thursday tomorrow” I told him, “and we come at any rate.”

Thursday Nov. 15, 2012

We go to South Mount Hebron. Dany and David from Tel Aviv, Ophir from Jerusalem, David Clinch from North Devon in Britain and myself from Shoval coming after a night without much sleep, trying to cope with the ugly music of the sirens. It is a bit surrealistic to go to South Mount Hebron in the West Bank and feel safer… I thought to myself. It was a short while thought since I knew already that it was not safe at all for the kids of Tuba two days ago while walking to school and being attacked by four masked settlers throwing stones at them.

We enter the cave of Omar’s family. Some of his kids are there. Inshirakh tells us how she, amongst a group of fifteen kids of all school ages, went to school the day before yesterday and how the settlers came from the trees and attacked them; and how the soldiers who accompany the kids by a jeep send the settlers away (without taking their names or arresting them.) She says she was afraid but continued to walk to school that day and the other days to come. They are used to be afraid, she says.

Does it matter to whom it is not safe? Since it is not safe to the kids it is not safe to me as well. And then it turns even more surrealistic. I am sitting in the cave in Tuba listening to Inshirakh’s story , calling Mustafa (my friend in Gaza) asking how is he, and calling my husband to ask him if Shoval has been bombed…

I remember a paragraph of a story I wrote some years ago after the Cast Lead war in 2009:

“…The First Intifada has ended. The Oslo Accords have evaporated. Israel has already sent in its army to occupy the Occupied West Bank and come out from this second Occupation into the first. The Second Intifada, too, has ended. The suicide bombings are over, for the time being. The First Lebanon War concluded the list of its buried. The Second as well. Rabin is already dead. Arafat is already dead. Sharon lives his own death. The elections in the Palestinian Authority brought the Hamas to power in Gaza. “Cast Lead” would take place in two years’ time, and when its wounds begin to heal, there will be “Cast Copper” or “Cast Silver” or any other appellation given in awe to the next war, the one that has not yet taken place but will surely come after “Cast Lead” that has not yet been cast, either, in 2007. We already know it was, however, because this story is being written now, in 2010. And the war that has not yet been will later be, and then will have been. In our region, for sheer wars for life, life is no longer sanctified. Only death.”

Hope for better days,

Yours with love, Erella (in the name of the other members of the Villages Group)

When I “identify with” you in your situation as you describe it in an honest way, I am forced to “identify with” the people who maybe live in the next apartment where you live in Israel, who may be the worst racists in the world. But they too are people in a situation which is as real as yours. Racism can nevr be the excuse for “anti-racism” where the oppressers are generalized about and made the target of preemptive warfare. The only effective “anti-racism” is living awareness.

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